Mint 19 is a ways off. I would assume eventually the devs would select a driver version for the AMDGPU drivers and set it up in the driver manager. At this point, AMD is updating the driver frequently. Mint 19 being down the road will give AMD plenty of time to get their drivers hashed out.

I know that I'm thinking too far ahead with this but the thing is that I really like Mint out of all the other distros I've tried and I wouldn't like to be forced to use another one, let alone go back to Windows again, especially now that I got quite used to it.

Even though I enjoy all the tinkering and stuff, I also want reliability. Sometimes we can't afford something that might suddenly break out of nowhere.

mperkel wrote:Anything I can do or should I just get a new graphics card?

Do regarding what? You don't need anything; you are currently running well-accelerated using the "radeon" driver. You will moreover in the future have access to AMDGPU and AMDGPU-PRO; Oland is GCN1 (aka."Southern Island"), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Core_Next#Graphics_Core_Next_.28Southern_Islands.29, which is to say that for now your card is only experimentally supported by AMDGPU (which you shouldn't bother with unless you're an expert) but will in the future be fully supported.

As to when "future" is only AMD knows -- but note once again that you are NOT missing out on anything currently. The "radeon" driver supports your card fine.

I bought a couple Samsung 32" TV sets to use as monitors and the text looked really bad. It almost looked that old CRTs with bad convergence. What should be a thin black vertical line seemed to have colored edges.

I thought it was the monitors. But I have a Windows 10 laptop so I thought I'd try it our and everything looks great. So I'm trying to understand why it looks like crap running Linux Mint and great running Windows?

Functional DDC? Was the Windows 10 laptop connected through the same cable to the same input on the TV?

Please post the output of inxi -Gx; it'll show you both which driver you are using and which resolution has been selected. You can with e.g. xrandr -s 1920x1080 for "1920x1080" any of the resolutions shown by plain xrandr see if anything works -- but if it would, things would've automatically been better so probably not. If you can attach or upload somewhere /var/log/Xorg.0.log we may be able to say something...

To a moderator: it would probably by the way be better to move the remainder of this subthread elsewhere...

Maybe I should explain more. I do have 2 24" monitors that I'm using now that are 1080 resolution that work pretty well. That's why I was surprised the Samsung 32 inch monitors looked so bad. At first I just thought the Samsung TVs were somehow unsuited for monitor use, but it works fine plugged into a Windows laptop.

So - just trying to understand what Windows is doing right that Linux isn't doing.

You didn't confirm/deny the W10 laptop being hooked up through the same cable to the same input on the TV.

Also, your inxi -Gx output indicates it being run from a virtual console. Does X not start at al and did you just fail to notice/mention? Or did you explicitly switch to a console? Just run it from a terminal opened in X.

I read this thread and follow AMD install instructions but no luck with amdgpu-pro-17.40-492261 on Linux Mint Mate 18.2 (kernel 4.10.0-38-generic)

(I change the ubuntu to linuxmint string as told in the guides, so the installation seems to install fine.)

The main problem was https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=256621 this error about OpenGL GLX extensions (there I post some extra info), but also the amdgpu-pro driver is not being used (instead its used the default radeon driver, even after reboot so I have graphical interface anyway, but no amdgpu-pro driver)

I tried uninstalling, reinstalling some times more, til I got a full black screen with the cursos blinking, so I had to crtl+alt+f1 to get to text terminal and uninstall. Before the uninstall, looked dmesg and Xorg.0.log for errors and found this in the last one:

I followed the instructions when installing the amdgpu-pro 17.40 driver for Ubuntu, however all I got is a blinking cursor at boot time.

Since I only need OpenCL working (for use in Blender), I noticed that the amdgpu-pro-install script supports a command-line option "--compute", which only installs the OpenCL related packages.This worked fine and Blender 2.79 recognized the GPU compute device. The performance is quite good!